Dangerous Women (34 page)

“I’ll put on a sweater and move the little heater from room to room. Like I did last year. Zonal heating. Most efficient way to heat a home.” She sipped her coffee.

He opened his hands on the table. “That’s fine. Until we start to get mold in the house from damp in the unheated basement. Mom, this is a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and you live in maybe four rooms of it. The only bathtub is upstairs and the laundry is in the basement. That’s a lot of stairs for you each day. The electrical box should have been replaced years ago. The refrigerator needs a new seal. The living room carpeting is fraying where it meets the tile.”

All things she knew. She tried to make light of it. “And the bulb is burned out in the back porch light. Don’t forget that!”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “When the beech tree dumps its leaves, we’ll need to rake them off the lawn and get them out of the rain gutters. And next year the house is going to need paint.”

She folded her lips. True, all true. “I’ll cross those bridges as I come to them,” she said, instead of telling him to mind his own damn business.

He leaned his elbows on the table and put his forehead in his hands. He didn’t look up at her as he said, “Mom, that just means you’ll call me when you can’t get the leaves into the lawn recycling bin. Or when the gutters are overflowing down the side of the house. You can’t maintain this place by yourself. I want to help you. But it always seems that you call me when I’m prepping a presentation or raking my own leaves.”

She stared at Alex, stricken. “I … Don’t come, if you’re that busy! No one dies from clogged gutters or leaves on the lawn.” She felt ashamed, then angry. How dare he make himself a martyr to her needs? How dare he behave as if she were a burden? She’d asked if he had time to help her, not demanded that he come.

“You’re my mom,” he said, as if that created some irrevocable duty that no one could erase. “What will people think if I let the house start falling apart around you? Besides, your house is your major asset. It has to be maintained. Or, if we can’t maintain it, we need to liquidate it and get you into something you can manage. A senior apartment. Or assisted living.”

“Alex, I’ll have you know this is my
home,
not my ‘major—’”

Alex held up a commanding hand. “Mom. Let me finish. I don’t have a lot of time today. So let me just say this. I’m not talking about a nursing home. I know how you hate visiting Uncle Richard. I’m talking about a place of your own with a lot of amenities, without the work of owning a home. This one, here?” He put his finger on a brochure, coaxed it out of the junk mail pile. “It’s in Olympia. On the water. They have their own little dock, and boats that residents can use. You can make friends and go fishing.”

She put a stiff smile on her face and tried to make a joke of it. “I can’t rake leaves but you think I can row a boat?”

“You don’t have to go fishing.” She had annoyed him, popping his dream of his mom in a happy little waterfront terrarium. “I’m just saying that you
could,
that this place has all sorts of amenities. A pool. An exercise studio. Daily shuttles to the grocery store. You could enjoy life again.”

He was so earnest. “The bathroom has this safety feature. If you fall, you pull a cord and it connects you, 24-7, to help. There’s a dining hall so if you don’t feel like cooking that day, you don’t have to. There’s an activity center with a movie room. They schedule game nights and barbecues and—”

“Sounds like summer camp for old farts,” she interrupted him.

He was wordless for a moment. “I just want you to know the possibilities,” he said stiffly. “You don’t like this, fine. There are other places that are just apartments suited to older people. All the rooms on one level, grab bars in the bathrooms, halls wide enough for walkers. I just thought you might like something nicer.”

“I have something nicer. My own home. And I couldn’t afford those places.”

“If you sold this house—”

“In this market? Ha!”

“Or rented it out, then.”

She glared at him.

“It would work. A rental agency would manage it for a percentage. Lots of people do it. Look. I don’t have time to argue today. Hell, I don’t have time to argue any day! And that’s really what we are discussing. I just don’t have time to be running over here every day. I love you, but you have to make it possible for me to take care of you and still have a life of my own! I’ve got a wife and kids; they need my time just as much as you do. I can’t work a job and take care of two households. I just can’t.”

He was angry now, and that showed how close he was to breaking. She looked at the floor. Sarge was under the table. He lifted sad brown eyes to her. “And Sarge?” she asked quietly.

He sighed. “Mom, he’s getting old. You should think about what is best for him.”

That afternoon, she got out the step stool and changed the bulb in the porch light. She dragged the aluminum ladder out of the garage, set it up, pulled the hose out, climbed the damn thing, and hosed out the gutters along the front of the garage. She raked the wet leaves and debris into a pile on a tarp and then wrestled it over to the edge of her vegetable plot and dumped them. Compost. Easier than fighting with a leaf bin.

She woke up at ten the next morning instead of six, aching all over, to an overcast day. Sarge’s whining woke her. He had to go. Getting out of bed was a cautious process. She put on her wrapper and leaned on the handrail going down the stairs. She let Sarge out into the foggy backyard, found the Advil, and pushed the button on the coffeemaker. “I’m going to do it until I can’t do it anymore,” she said savagely. “I’m not leaving my house.”

The newspaper was on the front doormat. As she straightened up, she looked at her neighborhood and was jolted by the change. When she and Russ had moved in, it had been an upwardly mobile neighborhood where lawns stayed green and mowed all summer, houses were repainted with clockwork regularity, and flower beds were meticulously tended.

Now her eyes snagged on a sagging gutter on the corner of the old McPherson house. And down the way, the weeping willow that had been Alice Carter’s pride had a broken branch that dangled down, covered in dead leaves. Her lawn was dead, too. And the paint was peeling on the sunny side of the house. When had it all become so run-down? Her breath came faster. This was not how she recalled her street. Was this what Alex was talking about? Had her forgetfulness become so encompassing? She clutched the newspaper to her breast and retreated into the house.

Sarge was scratching at the back door. She opened it for the beagle and then stood staring out past her fence. The pickup truck was there again. Red and rusting, one tire flat, algae on the windows. The pieces of broken tree branch still littered the street, and the wind had heaped the fallen leaves against them. Slowly, her heart hammering, she lifted her eyes to the gnarled apple trees that had replaced her memory of broomstick saplings. “This cannot be,” she said to the dog.

She lurched stiffly down the steps, Sarge trailing at her heels. She walked past her roses to the fence, peering through the tattered fog. Nothing changed. The more she studied her familiar neighborhood, the more foreign it became. Broken windows. Chimneys missing bricks, dead lawns, a collapsed carport. A rhythmic noise turned her head. The man came striding down the street, boots slapping through the wet leaves, the pink pack high on his shoulders. He carried the aluminum baseball bat across the front of his body, right hand gripping it, left hand cradling the barrel. Sarge growled low in his throat. Sarah couldn’t make a sound.

He didn’t even glance at them. When he reached the truck, he set his feet, measured the distance, and then hit the driver’s-side window. The glass held. He hit it again, and then again, until it was a spiderwebbed, crinkling curtain of safety glass. Then he reversed the bat and rammed the glass out of his way. He reached in, unlocked the door, and jerked it open.

“Where’s Linda? What did you do to her?”

Surely it was someone else who shouted the brave words. The man froze in the act of rummaging inside the cab. He straightened and spun around, the bat ready. Sarah’s knees weakened and she grabbed the top rail of her fence to keep from sagging. The man who glared at her was in his late teens. The unlaced work boots looked too big for him, as did the bulky canvas jacket he wore. His hair was unkempt and his spotty beard an accident. He scanned the street in all directions. His eyes swept right past her and her growling dog without a pause as he looked for witnesses. She saw his chest rise and fall; his muscles were bunched in readiness.

She stared at him, waiting for the confrontation.
Should have grabbed the phone. Should have dialed 911 from inside the house. Stupid old woman. They’ll find me dead in the yard and never know what happened.

But he didn’t advance. His shoulders slowly lowered. She remained standing where she was but he didn’t even look at her. Not worth his attention. He turned back to the cab of the truck and leaned in.

“Sarge. Come, boy. Come.” She moved quietly away from the fence. The dog remained where he was, tail up, legs stiff, intent on the intruder in his street. The sun must have wandered behind a thicker bank of clouds. The day grayed and the fog thickened until she could scarcely see the fence. “Sarge!” she called more urgently. In response to the worry in her voice, his growl deepened.

In the street, the thief stepped back from the truck, a canvas tool tote in his hands. He rummaged in it and a wrench fell. It rang metallic on the pavement and Sarge suddenly bayed. On his back, short, stiff hair stood up in a bristle. Out in the street, the man spun and stared directly at the dog. He knit his brows, leaning forward and peering. The fat beagle bayed again, and as the man lifted his bat, Sarge sprang forward, snarling.

The fence didn’t stop him.

Sarah stared as Sarge vanished into the rolling fog and then reappeared in the street outside her fence, baying. The man stooped, picked up a chunk of the rotten branch, and threw it at Sarge. She didn’t think it hit him, but the beagle yelped and dodged. “Leave my dog alone!” she shouted at him. “I’ve called the cops! They’re on the way!”

He kept his eyes on the dog. Sarge bayed again, noisily proclaiming his territory. The thief snatched a wrench from the tool pouch and threw it. This time she heard a meaty thunk as it hit her dog, and Sarge’s yipping as he fled was that of an injured dog. “Sarge! Sarge, come back! You bastard! You bastard, leave my dog alone!” For the man was pursuing him, bat held ready.

Sarah ran into the house, grabbed her phone, dialed it, and ran outside again. Ringing, ringing … “Sarge!” she shouted, fumbled the catch on the gate, and ran out into an empty street.

Empty.

No truck. No fallen branches or dead leaves. A mist under the greenbelt trees at the end of the street vanished as the sun broke through the overcast. She stood in a tidy urban neighborhood of mowed lawns and swept sidewalks. No shattered windshield, no shabby thief. Hastily, she pushed the “off” button on her phone. No beagle. “Sarge!” she called, her voice breaking on his name. But he was gone, just as gone as everything else she had glimpsed.

The phone in her hand rang.

Her voice shook as she assured 911 that everything was all right, that she had dropped the phone and accidentally pushed buttons as she picked it up. No, no one needed to come by, she was fine.

She sat at her kitchen table, stared at the street, and cried for two hours. Cried for her mind that was slipping away, cried for Sarge being gone, cried for a life spinning out of her control. Cried for being alone in a foreign world. She took the assisted living brochures out of the recycling bin, read them, and wept over the Alzheimer’s wing with alarms on the doors. “Anything but this, God,” she begged Him, and then thought of the sleeping pills the doctor had offered when Russ had died. She’d never filled the prescription. She looked for it in her purse. It wasn’t there.

She went upstairs and opened the drawer and looked in at the handgun. She remembered Russ showing her how the catch worked, and how she had loaded the magazine with ammunition. They’d gone plinking at tin cans in a gravel pit. Years ago. But the gun was still there, and when she worked the catch, the magazine dropped into her hand. There was an amber plastic box of ammunition next to it, surprisingly heavy. Fifty rounds. She looked at it and thought of Russ and how gone he was.

Then she put it back, got her basket, and went to pick Maureen’s apples. She and Hugh weren’t home, probably up at the Seattle hospital. Sarah filled her basket with heavy apples and lugged it home, planning what she would make. Jars of applesauce, jars of apple rings spiced and reddened with Red Hots candy. Empty jars waited, glass shoulder to shoulder, next to the enamel canner and the old pressure cooker. She stood in the kitchen, staring up at them and then at the apples on the counter. Put them in jars for whom? Who could trust anything she canned? She should drag them all down and donate them.

She shut the cupboard. Done and over. Canning was as done and over as dancing or embroidery or sex. No use mooning over it.

She washed and polished half a dozen apples, put them in a pretty basket with a late dahlia, and went to visit Richard. She left the basket at the desk with a thank-you note for the nurses and went in with the cup of coffee. She gave him sips of it and told him everything, about the fog and Linda disappearing and the man with her backpack. He watched her face and listened to the story she couldn’t tell anyone else. A shadow of life came back into his face as he offered a brother’s best advice. “Shoot the son of a bitch.” He shook his head, coughed, and added, “Poor old dog. But at least he probably went fast, eh? Better than a slow death.” He gestured around him with a bony, age-spotted hand. “Better than this, Sal. Better than this.”

She stayed an extra hour with him that day. Then she rode the bus home and went directly to bed. When she woke up at 2 a.m., she swept the floor and cleaned the bathroom and baked herself a lonely apple in the oven. The cinnamon-apple-brown-sugar smell made her weep. She ate it with tears on her cheeks.